The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (35 page)

“The big winner” at Vienna, another observer commented, “clearly, was China, at least if success is measured by telling other people to get out of the way. Beijing kept winning throughout the meeting simply by tossing its weight around.”
[19]
Outvoted and outmaneuvered at Vienna, the West was nonetheless able a few months later to score a not-insignificant victory against China. Securing the 2000 summer Olympics for Beijing was a major goal of the Chinese government, which invested tremendous resources in trying to achieve it. In China there was immense publicity about the Olympic bid and public expectations were high; the government lobbied other governments to pressure their Olympic associations; Taiwan and Hong Kong joined in the campaign. On the other side, the United States Congress, the European Parliament, and human rights organizations all vigorously opposed selecting Beijing. Although voting in the International Olympic Committee is by secret ballot, it clearly was along civilizational lines. On the first ballot, Beijing, with reportedly widespread African support, was in first place with Sydney in second. On subsequent ballots, when Istanbul was eliminated, the Confucian-Islamic connection brought its votes overwhelmingly to Beijing; when Berlin and Manchester were eliminated, their votes went overwhelmingly to Sydney, giving it victory on the fourth ballot and imposing a humiliating defeat on China, which it blamed squarely on the United States.
[F07]
“America and Britain,” Lee Kuan Yew commented, “succeeded in cutting China down to size. . . . The apparent reason was ‘human rights.’ The real reason was political, to show Western political clout.”
[20]
Undoubtedly many more people in the world are concerned with sports than with human rights, but given the defeats on human rights the West suffered at Vienna and elsewhere, this isolated demonstration of Western “clout” was also a reminder of Western weakness.

Not only is Western clout diminished, but the paradox of democracy also weakens Western will to promote democracy in the post-Cold War world. During the Cold War the West and the United States in particular confronted
_p. 198
the “friendly tyrant” problem: the dilemmas of cooperating with military juntas and dictators who were anti-communist and hence useful partners in the Cold War. Such cooperation produced uneasiness and at times embarrassment when these regimes engaged in outrageous violations of human rights. Cooperation could, however, be justified as the lesser evil: these governments were usually less thoroughly repressive than communist regimes and could be expected to be less durable as well as more susceptible to American and other outside influences. Why not work with a less brutal friendly tyrant if the alternative was a more brutal unfriendly one? In the post-Cold War world the choice can be the more difficult one between a friendly tyrant and an unfriendly democracy. The West’s easy assumption that democratically elected governments will be cooperative and pro-Western need not hold true in non-Western societies where electoral competition can bring anti-Western nationalists and fundamentalists to power. The West was relieved when the Algerian military intervened in 1992 and canceled the election which the fundamentalist FIS clearly was going to win. Western governments also were reassured when the fundamentalist Welfare Party in Turkey and the nationalist BJP in India were excluded from power after scoring electoral victories in 1995 and 1996. On the other hand, within the context of its revolution Iran in some respects has one of the more democratic regimes in the Islamic world, and competitive elections in many Arab countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt would almost surely produce governments far less sympathetic to Western interests than their undemocratic predecessors. A popularly elected government in China could well be a highly nationalistic one. As Western leaders realize that democratic processes in non-Western societies often produce governments unfriendly to the West, they both attempt to influence those elections and also lose their enthusiasm for promoting democracy in those societies.

If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history. In centuries past, differential growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental policies have produced massive migrations by Greeks, Jews, Germanic tribes, Norse, Turks, Russians, Chinese, and others. In some instances these movements were relatively peaceful, in others quite violent. Nineteenth-century Europeans were, however, the master race at demographic invasion. Between 1821 and 1924, approximately 55 million Europeans migrated overseas, 34 million of them to the United States. Westerners conquered and at times obliterated other peoples, explored and settled less densely populated lands. The export of people was perhaps the single most important dimension of the rise of the West between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.

The late twentieth century has seen a different and even larger surge in migration. In 1990 legal international migrants numbered about 100 million,
_p. 199
refugees about 19 million, and illegal migrants probably at least 10 million more. This new wave of migration was in part the product of decolonization, the establishment of new states, and state policies that encouraged or forced people to move. It was also, however, the result of modernization and technological development. Transportation improvements made migration easier, quicker, and cheaper; communications improvements enhanced the incentives to pursue economic opportunities and promoted relations between migrants and their home country families. In addition, as the economic growth of the West stimulated emigration in the nineteenth century, economic development in non-Western societies has stimulated emigration in the twentieth century. Migration becomes a self-reinforcing process. “If there is a single ‘law’ in migration,” Myron Weiner argues, “it is that a migration flow, once begun, induces its own flow. Migrants enable their friends and relatives back home to migrate by providing them with information about how to migrate, resources to facilitate movement, and assistance in finding jobs and housing.” The result is, in his phrase, a “global migration crisis.”
[21]

Westerners consistently and overwhelmingly have opposed nuclear proliferation and supported democracy and human rights. Their views on immigration, in contrast, have been ambivalent and changing with the balance shifting significantly in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Until the 1970s European countries generally were favorably disposed toward immigration and, in some cases, most notably Germany and Switzerland, encouraged it to remedy labor shortages. In 1965 the United States removed the European-oriented quotas dating from the 1920s and drastically revised its laws, making possible tremendous increases in and new sources of immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s, however, high unemployment rates, the increased numbers of immigrants, and their overwhelmingly “non-European” character produced sharp changes in European attitudes and policy. A few years later similar concerns led to a comparable shift in the United States.

A majority of late-twentieth-century migrants and refugees have moved from one non-Western society to another. The influx of migrants to Western societies, however, has approached in absolute numbers nineteenth-century Western emigration. In 1990 an estimated 20 million first generation immigrants were in the United States, 15.5 million in Europe, and 8 million in Australia and Canada. The proportion of immigrants to total population reached 7 percent to 8 percent in major European countries. In the United States immigrants constituted 8.7 percent of the population in 1994, twice that of 1970, and made up 25 percent of the people in California and 16 percent of those in New York. About 8.3 million people entered the United States in the 1980s and 4.5 million in the first four years of the 1990s.

The new immigrants came overwhelmingly from non-Western societies. In Germany, Turkish foreign residents numbered 1,675,000 in 1990, with Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece providing the next largest contingents. In Italy the princi
_p. 200
pal sources were Morocco, the United States (presumably largely Italian-Americans going back), Tunisia, and the Philippines. By the mid-1990s, approximately 4 million Muslims lived in France and up to 13 million in Western Europe overall. In the 1950s two-thirds of the immigrants to the United States came from Europe and Canada; in the 1980s roughly 35 percent of the much larger number of immigrants came from Asia, 45 percent from Latin America, and less than 15 percent from Europe and Canada. Natural population growth is low in the United States and virtually zero in Europe. Migrants have high fertility rates and hence account for most future population growth in Western societies. As a result, Westerners increasingly fear “that they are now being invaded not by armies and tanks but by migrants who speak other languages, worship other gods, belong to other cultures, and, they fear, will take their jobs, occupy their land, live off the welfare system, and threaten their way of life.”
[22]
These phobias, rooted in relative demographic decline, Stanley Hoffmann observes, “are based on genuine cultural clashes and worries about national identity.”
[23]

By the early 1990s two-thirds of the migrants in Europe were Muslim, and European concern with immigration is above all concern with Muslim immigration. The challenge is demographic—migrants account for 10 percent of the births in Western Europe, Arabs 50 percent of those in Brussels—and cultural. Muslim communities whether Turkish in Germany or Algerian in France have not been integrated into their host cultures and, to the concern of Europeans, show few signs of becoming so. There “is a fear growing all across Europe,” Jean Marie Domenach said in 1991, “of a Muslim community that cuts across European lines, a sort of thirteenth nation of the European Community.” With respect to immigrants, an American journalist commented,

European hostility is curiously selective. Few in France worry about an onslaught from the East—Poles, after all, are European and Catholic. And for the most part, non-Arab African immigrants are neither feared nor despised. The hostility is directed mostly at Muslims. The word “immigré” is virtually synonymous with Islam, now France’s second largest religion, and reflects a cultural and ethnic racism deeply rooted in French history.
[24]

The French, however, are more culturist than racist in any strict sense. They have accepted black Africans who speak perfect French in their legislature but they do not accept Muslim girls who wear headscarves in their schools. In 1990, 76 percent of the French public thought there were too many Arabs in France, 46 percent too many blacks, 40 percent too many Asians, and 24 percent too many Jews. In 1994, 47 percent of Germans said they would prefer not to have Arabs living in their neighborhoods, 39 percent did not want Poles, 36 percent Turks, and 22 percent Jews.
[25]
In Western Europe, anti-Semitism directed against Arabs has largely replaced anti-Semitism directed against Jews.

Public opposition to immigration and hostility toward immigrants manifested
_p. 201
itself at the extreme in acts of violence against immigrant communities and individuals, which particularly became an issue in Germany in the early 1990s. More significant were increases in the votes for right-wing, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. These votes were, however, seldom large. The Republican Party in Germany got over 7 percent of the vote in the European elections in 1989, but only 2.1 percent in the national elections in 1990. In France the National Front vote, which had been negligible in 1981, went up to 9.6 percent in 1988 and thereafter stabilized between 12 percent and 15 percent in regional and parliamentary elections. In 1995 the two nationalist candidates for president captured 19.9 percent of the vote and the National Front elected mayors in several cities, including Toulon and Nice. In Italy the votes for the MSI/National Alliance similarly rose from about 5 percent in the 1980s to between 10 percent and 15 percent in the early 1990s. In Belgium the Flemish Bloc/National Front vote increased to 9 percent in 1994 local elections, with the Bloc getting 28 percent of the vote in Antwerp. In Austria the vote in the general elections for the Freedom Party increased from less than 10 percent in 1986 to over 15 percent in 1990 and almost 23 percent in 1994.
[26]

These European parties opposing Muslim immigration were in large part the mirror image of Islamist parties in Muslim countries. Both were outsiders denouncing a corrupt establishment and its parties, exploiting economic grievances, particularly unemployment, making ethnic and religious appeals, and attacking foreign influences in their society. In both cases an extremist fringe engaged in acts of terrorism and violence. In most instances both Islamist and European nationalist parties tended to do better in local than in national elections. Muslim and European political establishments responded to these developments in similar fashion. In Muslim countries, as we have seen, governments universally became more Islamic in their orientations, symbols, policies, and practices. In Europe mainstream parties adopted the rhetoric and promoted the measures of the right-wing, anti-immigration parties. Where democratic politics was functioning effectively and two or more alternative parties existed to the Islamist or nationalist party, their vote hit a ceiling of about 20 percent. The protest parties broke through that ceiling only when no other effective alternative existed to the party or coalition in power, as was the case in Algeria, Austria, and, in considerable measure, Italy.

In the early 1990s European political leaders competed with each other to respond to anti-immigration sentiment. In France Jacques Chirac declared in 1990 that “Immigration must be totally stopped”; Interior Minister Charles Pasqua argued in 1993 for “zero immigration”; and Francois Mitterrand, Edith Cresson, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, and other mainstream politicians took anti-immigration stances. Immigration was a major issue in the parliamentary elections of 1993 and apparently contributed to the victory of the conservative parties. During the early 1990s French government policy was changed to make it more difficult for the children of foreigners to become citizens, for families of foreigners to immigrate, for foreigners to ask for the right of asylum,
_p. 202
and for Algerians to get visas to come to France. Illegal immigrants were deported and the powers of the police and other government authorities dealing with immigration were strengthened.